Mircea Cartarescu
I just stumbled across of Mircea Cartarescu in this year end wrap-up on Sight and Signal. The description sounds fantastic:
"Sometimes I explain my book as a mystical butterfly or a flying cathedral," says the author. Critics are overwhelmed by the sheer abundance of content, as well as the variety of genres Cartarescu masters, yet they still can't agree on how to classify the book. The NZZ calls it a "masterpiece of literary mannerism" - "as if de Chirico and Kafka, H. R. Giger and Bruno Schulz had got together and written a novel."
It points to a feature that they did on Cartarescu as well. Yep. Very interesting. I'm not so keen on the strong homosexual themes, simply because i'm heterosexual and am not into books at the moment that has sex as their primary themes in the first place. Still, i'll pick up a translation if it ever appears in the U.S.
Unfortunately that doesn't seem likely. This post by Thomas McGonigle, who reviewed Cartarescu's short story collection Nostalgia, released by New Directions in 2005, notes that only 500 copies of Nostalgia have been sold, so New Directions is not likely at this time to release any other books by Cartarescu.
I'll definitely buy Nostalgia in the coming months.
3 comments:
You'd do well to read it, actually. I'm not sure why you saw homosexual undertones--I don't deny they might not exist, but this is definitely not the point (and Cartarescu is married with children, and it's apparent from his other works that he's not gay). But: it's a wonderful book (see a more unconventional review here: http://booksarepretty.blogspot.com/search?q=mircea) and you'll be richer for reading it.
It was a review that labeled it that, not me.
I forgot the book until now, but shall endeavor to seek it out.
Post a Comment